I was thinking of Senator Robert Byrd
Posted on 09/17/2003 12:02:15 PM PDT by AntiGuv
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered fossils of the world's oldest genitals -- belonging to 400 million-year-old insects -- in ancient rocks in Scotland.
The penis of the ancient harvestmen insects, commonly known as a daddy-long-legs, was two-thirds the length of the body and remarkably similar to the modern-day species, New Scientist magazine said Wednesday.
"The discovery of the world's oldest genitals proves that little has changed over the last 400 million years -- at least for daddy-long-legs," the magazine said.
Jason Dunlop and a team of researchers from Humbolt University in Berlin, Germany, who will present their findings at a conference in Aberdeen, also uncovered a long egg-laying organ called an ovipositor from a female.
"As well as genitals, the fossils have the oldest known arachnid respiratory system, suggesting harvestmen's ancestors had long since crawled out of the sea and learned to breathe," the magazine said.
Harvestmen arachnids are sometimes mistaken for spiders but they are more closely related to ticks or mites because they do not spin webs.
The previous oldest penis, which dated back 100 million years and was found in Brazil, belonged an ostracod, an early crustacean related to crabs, shrimps and water fleas.
All you can say by looking at a fossil is that little of the external morphology has changed in the last 400 million years. Unfortunately, we can't examine how the genes have changed.
It's not surprising that a creature, once reaching an optimized morphology for its niche, would stop changing in appearance. Evolution would tend to weed out any changes that took it away from optimization. What's surprising to me is that the niche itself would remain stable for 400 million years.
I was thinking of Senator Robert Byrd
Byrd is ALL prick.
Wasn't that the name of one of those "film" stars?
I posted him because he is basically a walking, babbling, President Bush bashing "corpse." Ever see Byrd debate on the Senate floor? For a good laugh, watch him on C-Span-2. It's a specticle.
Maybe, but you'd never fall over!
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